Creating a Single Volume

Creating volumes on the FlashArray is very simple because we remove all of the complexities of needing to define RAID groups or aggregates. All of the below examples of how to work with volumes assumes that an existing connection to the Pure Storage FlashArray has been created using the Connecting to FlashArray topic.

Remember from the Connecting to FlashArray topic that the $FlashArray variable will be used to perform tasks against the authenticated FlashArray.

Let's first create a single volume using the New-PfaVolume cmdlet. The only parameters that are required:

Next is to retrieve all volumes on the FlashArray using the Get-PfaVolumes cmdlet. There are several hundred volumes on the FlashArray being used to write these samples so a Where-Object clause is used to only retrieve the SDK-Sample volumes. When retrieving multiple items it is suggested to use the Format options with Windows PowerShell to make the results easily readable.

Renaming a Volume

Renaming a volume can be accomplished using the Rename-PfaVolumeOrSnapshot cmdlet and can come in handy after creating a single or multiple volumes without the need to destroy the volume and create with the new name. In the below example the SDK-Sample-5 volume is renamed to SDK-Rename-5. We use the Get-PfaVolumes cmdlet again to show all of the volumes like 'SDK-*'.

Below is an example of using the Get-PfaVolumeIOMetrics for an individual volume which shows details related to I/O reporting (reads, writes). For detailed information on how to calculate and intepret the different properties read Calculating Block Size with the PowerShell SDK.